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The Secret Cuts: Part Two, The Independent Living Fund

The Independent Living Fund is vital to anyone who has a severe impairment and still hopes to live their life. Alan White and Kate Belgrave explore the decision to close it and devolve its work to cashstrapped councils.

Next week, the Independent Living Fund (ILF) is 25 years old – or it would be, if Esther McVey hadn't decided to close it. The idea that people with severe disabilities can live as independent adults, go to work or university and even leave the house when they feel like it has been hit by this closure.

The ILF is a standalone fund that pays for extra carer help for people with severe disabilities: always-present, round-the-clock carers (called personal assistants) in the cases of recipients Penny Pepper and Sophie Partridge who appear in the videos that accompany this article. Neither Penny nor Sophie can transfer unaided and both hire PAs to provide the physical help they need to live their busy daily lives. In the video below, writer and performer Sophie explains exactly how they help her.

Sophie's local council, Islington, funds half of her care costs and the ILF pays for the other half. Without the fund, she faces the prospect of being stuck alone in her flat, unable to move or clean herself, or even to leave if there's ever a fire or an emergency. She worries in particular that she'll be left alone at night, because “councils are reluctant to fund people's night-time care packages” and that people are being told that they should use incontinence pads at night, even if they're not incontinent. That's the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that she will be packed off to an under-funded, under-resourced care home where she'll go nowhere and do nothing except “sit around all day waiting to go to the loo and all the rest of it.”

“The direct fear we have is that they will impose going in an institution on us – which [could also mean] imposing moving out of the borough,” says Islington writer and journalist Penny Pepper, who also says she will take Islington council to court - “no question” - if the council tries to force her into a care home.

That's why the ILF is so vital. It's vital to anyone who has a severe impairment and still hopes to live their life. Through illness or injury, that could be any of us at any time. The Independent Living Fund and the ethos behind it matter to us all except the Government, it seems. At the end of last year, the DWP made the decision to close the fund and devolve it to cashstrapped councils – councils that can't meet demands for care services as it is, let alone pay for people with complex needs like Sophie and Penny.

But as Kate wrote earlier this year: “Anyone who says councils will be able to finance these complex care packages in this appalling funding environment, with these monumental care funding gaps, is either dreaming, or lying.” It seems safe to assume this government is lying and that people will die because of it. Provision is already at tremendously low levels – as anyone who read our story last week on Barnet council's disastrous attempts to outsource and profit from care for people with learning difficulties will know (watch how the board of the private company in charge of care there walked out of a meeting with concerned parents. Board members said they didn't have to hear parents out as the company was a private one).

Being placed in the “substantial” or “critical” bands does not guarantee that needs will be met, either: this Lancashire woman, who has cerebral palsy and is in the “substantial” needs band, has to stay in bed on weekend, because her care hours don't stretch to weekends.

Councils have been taken to court for trying to restrict care, or for increasing charges. John Pring's excellent Disability News Service reported recently that Worcestershire county council faces a judicial review for capping care costs in a scheme where some service users “whose care costs exceed a certain limit will be told to either meet the shortfall themselves, find a cheaper means of support – perhaps by using direct payments – or 'receive their care in a residential or nursing home'”. The We Are Spartacus campaign wrote a thorough report on the Worcestershire cap last year.

So you can see why ILF recipients wanted to challenge the "consultation" exercise that led to the closure decision – and to keep alive the idea that independent living support should be available to anyone who needs it. Bafflingly, they lost their case - as this statement says, “the court found that the consultation process concerning the closure was lawful and that the DWP had met the public sector equality duty when deciding to go ahead.”

The DWP has been extremely unclear about the way the devolution of funds will work, or for how long. At the recent court case, lawyers for ILF recipients discovered that there was no clarity on plans to continue devolution of the fund after 2015.

Louise Whitfield from Deighton Pierce Glynn tells us that the concern is that after 2015, there will be no extra funding at council level for people who are ILF recipients and who have high-level needs. Care for those people would be funded out of councils' general adult social care budgets – budgets which, as we've discussed, are already fatally strained. She says: “In a submission to a minister, the DWP’s position was stated as: 'There are presentational risks for DWP to a delayed transfer. The transfer of funding outside of the overall social care settlement would be more transparent and may lead this department open to criticism that we have not transferred enough to meet user needs if we are unable to secure the full amount administered by the ILF at the point of closure.' So not only does no-one know how much money will be devolved, the DWP didn’t want it to be transparent in case they didn’t give local authorities enough, because then they might get criticised.”

The DWP sent us an odd statement in which it seemed to suggest that the idea was to lobby spending reviews for ILF funding after 2015: “The distribution of ILF funding for 2016/17 and future years will be agreed at the subsequent spending reviews.” The DWP also said that it was "not possible at this time to determine precisely what sums will be devolved to each Local Authority or Devolved Administration from April 2015."

No wonder people are worried. Why would anyone have confidence that any funding will be made available at all? “This is about reform,” the department said and continues to say. “There is no intention to remove funding for the ILF from the social care system.” Our two cents – if you believe that, you'll believe anything. If we've seen nothing else in the past few years, we've seen monumental cuts to social care. Look at this recent list of cuts that councils are making to adult social care. By the time the ILF is “devolved” to councils, the DWP will be perfectly placed to say that any shortfall in care is the responsibility/fault of local authorities.

And that has people frightened – for themselves and for the rest of us. This is an interview with Penny Pepper:

Kate has been speaking to Penny for much of this year, but this is the first time she's made this sort of statement: “I'm actually working on a piece about Godwin's Law, because I think this is quite scary. I really do. It does have parallels. Like the Colin Brewer [issue] – unbelievable.” It's one of the reasons that Penny speaks fervently against assisted suicide (she writes in more detail about this below). “I'm not against suicide – I think that suicide is everyone's right. I'm completely against any change to allow doctors to assist with suicide. It it's too dangerous and that is what the doctors in you saw in Nazi Germany did.”

Sophie Partridge has been wondering out loud on these issues as well. She didn't several months ago, as you can see here, when she said “you don't really want to go there” - but things have changed in that time. “You've had the [Cornish councillor] making his comments about disabled children costing too much and equating us with two-headed sheep and how we should just be knocked on the head.”

Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) plans to hold a 25th birthday party for the ILF next week. It will be a celebration of independent living, but also a lament, if you will – for the fund and for the idea that we've abandoned the idea that anyone who is born with or acquires a disability should be supplied with the carers and the equipment they need to live, just like everyone else.

In response to our report, a DPAC spokesperson said: "This Government said they would support those disabled people most in need: they have proved time and time again that they will not. The ILF issue is one of the most serious breaches of the UNCRPD to date. It is fundamentally wrong". Tracey Lazard, CEO of Inclusion London said, “The closure of the Independent Living Fund effectively represents the end of disabled people’s right to independent living, something disabled people fought hard for many years to win. We are seeing the consequences of the closure to new applicants in 2010 with disabled people trapped in their own home, lacking any kind of quality of life and too frightened to complain in case they lose the very little support they get now.

People might say that I see an unsavoury connection between the closure of the Independent Living Fund and the overwhelming support for assisted suicide.

I would argue it is much more than this because the ILF exits to support ‘severely’ disabled people to live in the community independently and it is ‘severely’ disabled people who find themselves living in a culture which has a view that vague, non-specific notions of ‘suffering’ and high levels of impairment are best resolved by suicide, with a glib assumption that this is wholly compassionate and ethically just.

For all that we have Dignity in Dying, we have the lesser known Not Dead Yet, with many lead members, such as ‘severely suffering’ individuals - Independent member in the Lords, Dame Jane Campbell, and my friend, conceptual artistKatherine Araniello.

It’s a messy business. I don’t personally know any disabled person who is against suicide per se. It’s more about the very slippery slope of giving doctors the means to help us off our mortal coil. I have been on that slope, and I have been afraid.

I would suggest that the closure of the Independent Living Fund, set against the increasing publicity around assisted suicide law, makes this a matter of economic cleansing: we are slowly coaxed to believe we are too expensive to keep alive and it’s kinder if we are convinced to die.

But, in terms of the ILF and assisted suicide, you won’t catch me going gently into the final goodnight – or into a care institution.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.